It all becomes clear to me in an instant—I think all along most of it was there, digging through my subconscious, but I haven’t truly seen the full picture until now: the paintings of this fateful place where his brother died; how he fell back into their darkness and their colors and their power the moment I left him and went back to Oahu; Kendra telling me, Since you came here he’s changed. He’s happier … He’s just better around you, and Alicia telling me, Ever since you came around, he seems a lot happier … Instead of getting better, he just seemed to be getting worse up until recently, and I hate to see Luke falling back into that dark place once you’re gone.
That strange, unfamiliar, dark feeling I had before finally has a name—punishing bereavement—and those questions finally have devastating answers:
Is Luke latching on to me for the right reasons?
No.
Have I become something he needs for all the wrong reasons? Yes.
A deep, burrowing pain, like a fist in my chest, drills its way into the depths of my heart. I know it’s true, that Luke may care deeply for me; he may want to love me unlike he’s ever loved anyone—but not more than his brother. Because he hasn’t made peace with his brother’s death; he hasn’t forgiven himself, and until he can, Luke will live in darkness.
Tears stream in rivulets from my eyes, but I’m too lost in the truth and this moment to gather the strength to wipe them away.
I feel like I should be disappointed, that I should feel somewhat betrayed, or even used, but I don’t. There’s no room in my heart for that right now because of the sorrow I feel for how lost to the world Luke really is, and because I know I’m not the answer to his pain. I want to be. I want nothing more than to be, but I know that I can’t be.
Will Luke’s guilt ultimately kill him?
Finally I reach up and wipe the tears, my chest shuddering with a million more.
I flip the DVD case over to look on the back. And I read. And the more I read, the more broken my heart becomes. China. Tian Keng, the Heavenly Pit. The place where Landon died.
The place where Luke died.
The thoughts are so loud now in the back of my mind that I can almost hear the words. They’re so strong, so relentless, that I know I can’t ignore them for much longer. I can’t push them down and think of things that make me smile anymore. They’re winning.
I pop the DVD of Journey to the Center into the player and I don’t even make it to the couch. I sit down on the floor in front of the television. And I hit play. And I don’t take my eyes off the screen for the next hour while I reluctantly go along on the journey with three world-renowned BASE jumpers who made this jump in China. Three who lived doing it, whose passion to make the jump terrifies me on levels I don’t understand.
And when it’s over, I wipe the tears from my cheeks and absently watch the credits roll, but all I can hear are those screaming thoughts. And I hate them. I fucking hate them.
I open a web page on my phone and immediately begin googling BASE jumping. And for another hour I read story after story, and my life comes falling apart around me, bit by bit, piece by painful piece.
A BASE JUMPER DIES AFTER CRASHING INTO A CLIFF FACE.
… LEG SEVERED AT THE HIP AFTER CLIPPING A BRIDGE
The Deadliest Extreme Sport in the World
Another BASE jumping death—Troll Wall, Norwegian West Coast
… her parachute failed to open.
“If you’re not ready to die BASE jumping, you’re not ready to go BASE jumping.”—FROM THE SNAKE RIVER BASE ACADEMY’S READER
Welcome to Death Camp
… BOTH LEGS NEARLY SEVERED BELOW THE KNEE …
A Sport to Die For
HORRIFIC 2,000-FOOT PLUNGE TO DEATH
“The next best thing to suicide.”—Tom Aiello
“After identifying his body, it took me a long time to remember what he actually looked like.”
“Our friends started dying off one by one—that’s the reality of life and death in this sport.”
I can’t read anymore.
I leave my phone on the floor and push myself shakily to my feet, my hands running through the top of my hair, tears wet on my face, my heart exhausted.
Don’t let it scare you away. If you really like Luke as much as I think you do, remember why, and don’t let anything else change that.
Now I understand what Kendra meant when she said those words to me.
I can’t do this.
I rush quickly out the back door, letting the screen slam shut behind me. And I stare out at the ocean from the lanai, just like I did before, but now with a heavy heart and a thousand screaming thoughts inside my head, whose words are unmistakable: You weren’t cut out for this kind of life, Sienna, they tell me. You know there’s no way you can be with this amazing guy, always worried that he’s going to die too soon, they torture me. You knew this the second you learned about it, but you chose to ignore it because you’re falling in love with him, they remind me. This sport will kill Luke just like it did Landon, and you know it, Sienna, they haunt me.
I run down the steps and out onto the beach, falling against the sand on my bottom and crying into my hands.
“And I could never ask him to change who he is for me,” I say aloud to myself, recalling what he said to me just yesterday.
It’s in this moment that I know what had started as a vacation and became something so much more is over.
THIRTY
Luke
The first thing I notice when Braedon walks into our store after my short shift is his arm.
“Is that another tattoo?” I ask as he walks up in a black T-shirt where a colorful Mad Hatter peeks out on his right biceps.
“Yeah, man, whadya think?” He lifts the arm of the shirt away from the ink.
“That’s sweet,” I say, examining it closer. “When did you get it?”
“Yesterday after we went skydiving,” he says and drops the arm of the shirt back down.
The bell above the door chimes as a customer walks in—a regular, who comes in once a month. Braedon and I both wave at him from across the small space. He waves back and heads over to the surfboards on the back wall.
“Are yah ever gonna tell me about that girl you got stayin’ in your house?” Braedon grins faintly amid a tanned face framed by dark hair.
That unrelenting smile attacks my whole face again, and when Braedon sees it, his grin just gets bigger.
“Ah shit, man, seriously?” he says, knowing the whole scenario without me having to explain it to him. “She must be somethin’.”
He steps around behind the counter and punches buttons on the register.
“Yeah … she is.”
“She seems sweet,” he says and closes the register after putting a few twenties inside. “Cute as hell, too. But afraid of heights.” He glances at me briefly.
“Yeah, but we’re workin’ on that.” I lean on the counter, my arms lying across the top. “But I don’t think it’s an issue this time. Sienna’s different from other girls.”
Braedon doesn’t say anything. I know what he’s thinking, but he’s the opposite of Seth and doesn’t care to speak his mind. Braedon has always been the laid-back one of us, never offering much in the way of advice even when you ask for it. He prefers to let people find their own way because, in his words, they’re going to anyway.
“She’s different,” I repeat, though I think I said it more to myself than to Braedon this time, as if I need the reassurance.
I brush off that brief bout of doubt and let the dopey smile take over again.
The customer walks up and I step aside.
“Well, I’m gonna head out,” I say.
“All right,” Braedon says. “Can you cover for me Tuesday?”
“Sure thing,” I call out as I make my way to the tall glass door. “See yah later!”
The door closes behind me with the jingling of the bell.
I feel like I can’t get back to see Sienna fast e
nough.
Sienna’s been acting strange today. Ever since I got back from the shop, she seems a little distant. When she smiles at me it feels like there’s something else going on behind it. When I kiss her she kisses me back, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
I think I know what’s wrong; the same thing that’s wrong with me—she’s going back to San Diego in the morning.
I’m determined to make her last night with me memorable.
For the rest of the day, even though I feel as shitty as she probably does inside, I keep a smile on my face. I mess with her head as normally as I would any other day. I take her surfing and we walk along the beach together before sunset. And I get the smiles out of her that I can’t get enough of. But in a small way, it somehow feels … forced: the smiles, her kisses, her laughter. I just want to cheer her up, make her feel better about having to leave, let her know that nothing will change and that we’ll see each other again soon.
Finally, just before sunset, she begins to seem herself again. She curls up next to me in the hammock and we talk for a long time about her family, and later I tell her about the many odd jobs I’ve had—she laughs when I tell her I used to wear a chicken costume and stand outside a restaurant flashing an advertisement sign.
“Hey, you wouldn’t think so,” I say, “but several chicks walked up just to talk to me when I was sweatin’ my balls off in that costume.”
“Nuh-uh,” she says, wrinkling her freckled nose. “There’s nothing sexy about that.”
“That’s what I thought,” I say with a shrug.
She crosses her arms, sitting on the other end of my sofa across from me, our legs tangled in the center.
“You got laid, didn’t you?” She smirks and her playful jealousy is cute as hell.
I shrug my shoulders again, pursing my lips and looking off toward the television.
She makes a short breathy noise and her mouth falls open.
“Oh no, you did!” She throws her head back and laughs. “You got laid in a chicken costume!”
“HA! HA! No, not in the costume, but I did pick up a few girls when I worked there.”
She presses her toes, painted all kinds of weird colors, into the side of my thigh.
“That’s hilarious,” she says, shaking her head. “I see people dressed up in all kinds of strange costumes, dancing on the side of the road holding up signs, but I have never thought to pull over and hit on any of them. It’s an unfortunate, unsexy job.” She chuckles.
I poke her back with my foot in her thigh.
“Apparently not for all of us,” I say with a grin.
Every now and then, in times like this one, Sienna seems back to her playful self again, forgetting about having to leave. But she always slips back into that seemingly depressed state of mind that bothers me, even though she tries really hard not to let it show. I don’t want her to go. Hell, I’m crazy enough about her that if I didn’t think it’d be crossing some kind of line too soon, I’d tell her I want her to stay here with me for as long as she wants. But I know it wouldn’t be that simple. It wouldn’t be like it was that day two weeks ago when I asked her to miss her plane. Or when I told her to stay for two weeks. Sienna has a family and a job and a life in California. And I have all of that stuff here.
No, it wouldn’t be that easy.
It’s just an hour after dark and Sienna is inside taking a shower. The second she got in there, I went into my bedroom and dug through a box in my closet where I keep the holiday stuff I haven’t used in two years. It takes me five minutes to unravel a string of solid white Christmas lights. I plug them into an extension cord and take them outside, stretching the cord across the yard as far as it’ll go. I string the lights around the base of a palm tree.
I step back and cock my head to one side, looking at my work.
Damn.
OK, it kinda looks like shit—this crafty chick stuff really isn’t my thing, but I continue with it, going around the front of the house to get the other stuff out of the trunk of the car that I picked up from the store on the way home from the shop.
It doesn’t turn out at all like it was supposed to.
I feel like an idiot.
Sienna
I have to tell him. I’ve been avoiding it all day, both because I didn’t know how to say it, and also because I’ve been trying to force myself not to see it that way. I had hoped that maybe my mind would change and I’d be able to accept it, his dangerous lifestyle. Because it’s true—I care about Luke enough that I want desperately to just accept it. But the longer I thought about it, the more he held me in his arms, kissed my lips, made me smile and laugh and feel unlike I’ve ever felt before about any guy, the more it became clear to me that it would hurt a thousand times worse to lose him.
It would kill me to lose him like that.
So the only thing I can do is let him go like this, now, before we get so close that nothing can separate us other than death.
I blow-dry my hair and pin it to the top of my head before putting on a tank top and my ball shorts.
Luke isn’t anywhere inside the house, so I go out onto the lanai to see if he’s sitting at the table. He’s not. I start to go back inside, but then I notice an out-of-place arrangement of white lights and flickering flames out ahead in the short distance closer to the beach.
I follow the light, tiptoeing my way through the prickly grass in the dark in my bare feet. Soon the grass becomes sand and the flickering lights become brighter and the steady lights become more apparent. A string of white Christmas lights have been wrapped around a palm tree, illuminating the sand and the grass poking up from it. A blanket has been laid out over the sand beneath the tree, surrounded by a few Mason jars propped in the sand, glowing with little white candles inside.
After I’ve shaken off a little of the surprise and I see Luke standing there smiling back at me, all I want to do is smile and cry at the same time—smile because he did this for me and cry because he’s made it that much harder to tell him what I need to tell him.
He waves a hand, palm up, at his handiwork, a blush in his face he’s trying so hard to hide. “It looked better in my head,” he says and then reaches behind and scratches the back of his neck nervously.
I smile, shaking my head, looking to and from Luke and the most thoughtful thing a guy has ever done for me.
“No, it’s really perfect, Luke.” I smile and then laugh gently. “I didn’t know you were so crafty.”
He shrugs and buries his hands in his pockets, still nervous, and I think it’s adorable—big, strong, death-defying BASE jumping guy more worried about what I’ll think of his craft skills than killing himself jumping off a cliff.
“Well, technically I’m not.” He chuckles. “I, uh, kinda got the idea from one of those binders you brought with you.”
Wow … he really put a lot of thought and effort into this whole thing. It’s the sweetest, most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me before. I almost want to cry; a tightening sensation grips the center of my chest, threatening to bring tears of happiness, as well as tears of sorrow and regret, to the surface, but I retain my bright smile and try to hold them down, deflecting the pain with humor.
“You read my binder?” I ask accusingly.
He winces. “I’m sorry. I just—”
I smile and step toward him, making my way around two flickering glass jars. “I’m just messing with you,” I tell him and lay my head against his chest.
It wasn’t like he had to dig through my stuff to find that binder; I had left it out on the floor beside my suitcase for days. Besides, I looked through a photo album I found of his on a shelf in the living room while he was at work today, so I guess we’re even.
“You did pretty good your first time,” I say. “I should hire you on as my new assistant.”
His arms tighten around me.
“I doubt we’d ever get any work done,” he says suggestively.
After a quiet moment, Luke tells me
to sit down and he goes into the house and comes back minutes later with a few Coronas in a wooden ice bucket with a handle. And we sit together on the blanket, surrounded by little lights and little flames illuminating a small space around us. And we drink and we talk and he tells me more about his trip to Norway soon with Seth and Kendra, still oblivious to how I really feel about it.
“It’s really important to you to go there, isn’t it?” I ask, looking up at the stars with my head lying on his arm where it joins his shoulder.
He’s looking up at the stars with me, his free arm bent upward and propped behind his head, his bare feet crossed below at the ankles.
“Yeah,” he says. “Landon wanted it to be his birthday jump. Since he can’t be there to do it himself, I dunno, I’m glad to be able to do it for him.”
I say nothing for a while.
“What about after that?” I ask. “Seth made it sound like you’ll all be doing a lot of traveling.”
His arm that I’m lying on tightens a little around me. His thumb brushes the skin on my wrist as it rests against my stomach.
“Hey,” he says in a soft voice, “if that’s what’s bothering you, let me say right now that you can go anywhere with me that you want. Mexico, Australia, Switzerland, even Norway in two weeks if you want. I’d love for you to go with us.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think I could do that … I mean”—why can’t I just tell him? I need to tell him—“I just have to get back to work and I won’t have another vacation for a while.” I swallow a nervous lump and feel nauseous and heartbroken.
“Well, no matter where I go,” he says, “we’ll definitely keep in touch.”
For an even longer time than before, I say nothing.
Then finally: “Is going to all of those places really important to you?”
I feel him nod. “Yeah,” he says distantly, as if he’s off somewhere else. “It was important to my brother and that’s why it’s so important to me.”
Privately, I lower my eyes in sadness.